The Long Sleep (9 page)

Returning to the tiny barred window in the door, he studied the hall again. Silence. Dripping water. Candlelight. No one had heard the hinges rattling.

He knelt and began to work with the bottom bolt on the lowest of the three hinge plates. He twisted and tugged at it, jammed it back and forth in its hole in the stone. Powdered granite puffed out, dusted his fingers. Inch by grudging inch, the bolt came free, until he held it in his hand. He took the second bolt out of the flange, then the third. For a moment he was thrilled, flushed with success. If he were diligent—and quiet enough not to draw their attention—within an hour he would have the other six bolts free. Then he could lift the oak door out of its frame, set it against the wall, and—

—that was wrong. All wrong.

You stupid ass,
he thought.

It was a trap.

The hinge bolts had not been loose earlier. When he had first regained consciousness in this place, after he had frightened off the rat, he had tried the door. He'd shaken it pretty hard. Nothing had rattled. It had been as solid and immovable as the entrance to a bank vault. Nor had the door made any unusual noise when Henry Galing paid his little visit. And if the bolts were loose then, they would have squeaked like hell as the door was pulled all they way open. So . . . Figure it . . . If the bolts were less secure now than they had been, there was only one explanation: Galing and Richard had loosened them for him.

Very neat.

He couldn't figure how they'd done it, for he hadn't seen any of them touch the hinges. Had Allison-Annabelle pried them out of place while his attention was diverted to Galing and Richard? No.

She'd always been in the doorway, standing, stiff and scared. When the prod had been shoved into his face—could he have passed out long enough for the job to be done? He thought he'd been unconscious for only a few seconds. But it might have been minutes. Christ, it might have been
hours!
However they'd managed it, here was a boldly offered escape route.

Obviously, if they wanted him to go out this way, he must not oblige them.

He would take the script and tear it up. This was
his
play now,
his
stage. He was ready for a bit of dramatic improvisation.

He thought: there is another way out of here,

Henry. I would much prefer to use the door. But there is another way.

That was a problem with stage settings. They were not as formidable as the real item. They could always collapse on you in the middle of a crucial scene. If this had been a real prison cell, the men who had built it would have made damned sure that the only way out was through the front door. But this was a jerry-rigged cell, not a bad stage setting, a nifty piece of theater, but a poor reality.

He went to the drainage grill that was set in the center of the cobbled floor. So far as he could tell, the iron work was not welded in place. Kneeling, he hooked his fingers in the grid and strained against it. Wedged in place, partly cemented by grime, it would not at first budge. He pulled harder, grunted as his tender hip and stomach suddenly flushed full of new pain. Without warning, the grid came away, almost knocked him backwards. He took it from its chiseled niche and put it quietly to one side.

The storm drain smelled like a dead horse lying on a compost heap on a hot July day. A cool draft rose from it, rich with sarcophagus odors.

He leaned away from it and gasped for fresh air. Gagging, he considered using the door even if they were expecting him to go that way. He didn't want to have to face the incredible stench and limitless darkness of that tunnel. Especially the darkness: it had a very real quality of evil in it. Then he remembered the candle in the pan by the door, and he went to fetch it.

He placed the pan and the stubby candle on the edge of the drain opening. The orange flame leaped up, forked like a snake's tongue. It danced wildly as the draft caught it, and it caused his shadow to cavort demonically on the stone walls. A thin string of soot wriggled lazily toward the ceiling. Most of the light was wasted: it filled every corner of the cell but it didn't illuminate the pit beneath him.

Lying on his stomach, he eased himself backwards and slid into the drain feet first. Balanced on his stomach on the rude stone edge of the hole, he gripped the cell floor with both hands and lowered himself all the way down.

However, even when he was hanging full length from the lip of the drain, his feet did not touch the floor of the tunnel. What would happen when he let go? He had a brief but vivid vision of himself falling head over heels down a mile-long shaft into the black bowels of the earth. He would scream and flail the whole way down, to no purpose.

He began to sweat.

The door didn't seem like such a bad way to leave anymore. Not even if Galing
did
want him to go that way . . .

He stretched as best he could, kicked his feet, tried to find the tunnel floor. Ke kicked empty air.

You can't hang here forever, he told himself.

His muscles ached from scarless wounds. His hip was throbbing and hot. His stomach felt as if it were tearing away from the rest of him, and he thought he might be sick any second now. Sweat ran into his eyes. He blinked, licked salty lips, looked up at the well lighted cell . . .

“Oh, what the hell,” he whispered.

He let go.

The tunnel floor was inches beneath his feet, and he met it like a cat landing on its feet. It didn't even jar him.

He reached up and brought the candle down with him, looked at the slimy gray-brown walls. It wasn't very pleasant, but it was better than the cell

No one called out overhead. He knew that he was going to get out clean and easy.

He turned quickly into the right-hand branch of the tunnel and walked away from that place.

XI

He was afraid of rats. He remembered only too well the size, strength, and potential ferocity of the specimen that had been contentedly gnawing on his shoe when he woke in the prison cell. When he'd met it's glittering red eyes he had seen no fear in it; indeed, he felt that it was carefully, brazenly sizing him up, calculating its chances if it were to attack. If it hadn't been alone, if another rat had been with it . . . How many of its relatives lived down here in the drains? Dozens?

Hundreds? If they were to come after him, not one at a time but in legions, he knew that he would not be able to save himself.

Then, when he was hardly more than a dozen steps into the drain, he saw the rat. It was sitting in the middle of the tunnel floor, facing him. He almost turned and ran before he realized that something was wrong with it. Its eyes were dark brown circles; they were no longer bloodshot, no longer red and glittering. And it was absolutely motionless, as if it were dead—except that it was on its feet and not in any posture of death.

Ready to jump sideways and run if it should begin it move, he closed in on the rat. It remained still, silent, dark-eyed. He knelt beside it, touched it, picked it up, turned it over, and saw that it was a machine.

Well,
he thought,
why not"?
A mechanical rat . . .

Thus far, every one of Galing's stage settings had been especially well detailed and realistically drawn. At the beginning of each new act in this senseless drama, Joel had been convinced, to one degree or another, that it was perfectly real. If Galing could go to the trouble of setting up that scene with the aquamen, why not a robot rat to nibble at his shoe and throw a bit of fear into him?

At least they had not put him in a place where
genuine
rats could come to dine on him. The mechanical rodent was a little extra insurance for them, a nasty deterrent that would keep him from going down into the storm drains. They had evidently put some thought into it . . . They had sent the rat to chew on his sole; they had caused it to escape down the drain; and they thought that, knowing the tunnel contained rats, Joel would certainly choose to leave his cell through the front door, according to the program. Anyway, if they hadn't really endangered him, it must mean that they didn't actually want to kill or maim him.

Or maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe they hadn't used a real rat simply because they couldn't get hold of one.

Whatever the case, they had underestimated his anger and frustration. When he had a choice between twelve-pound rats and Galing's program, he had gladly chosen the rats.

Joel threw the machine to the floor of the tunnel. Transistors and circuit boards broke inside of it.

He held the candle pan high and continued down the drain, no longer worried about rats.

What he
did
have to worry about was the moss. He was afraid it was going to block his escape.

The deeper he went into the subterranean passageway, the thicker the moss became. It grew on the curved walls of the drain, above his head, below his feet, on both sides of him. When he first noticed it, the moss only flourished in widely scattered patches. But the farther he walked the larger those patches became and the closer they were to one another—until the stuff finally sheathed every inch of the inside walls of the corrugated steel pipe. It was spongy, damp and blue-green, and it shimmered prettily in the candlelight. Once it had claimed all the metal surface, it stopped growing laterally and began to thrust tendrils into the air space; it was as thick and often as long as a young girl's hair. It was cold to the touch, unnaturally cold for plant life. In places it thrived so well that he was forced to squeeze through a narrowed tunnel, sometimes on his hands and knees, the wet moss dragging over him like the hands of a corpse.

Moss slapped across his eyes.

He pushed it aside.

It got in his mouth.

He spat it out.

Once when he stopped to rest, he made the mistake of examining the growth too closely. He saw that the hair-thin filaments which constituted the mother-plant were in a constant sate of agitation.

They twisted through one another, abraded one another, braided one another . . . They slithered like snakes, writhed, wrapped together and pulsed as if fornicating, extricated themselves only to form new entanglements. The moss appeared to have the life energy and some of the mobility of an animal, as if some crude intelligence were at the core of it.

He didn't like to speculate about that. He was certain that the moss was not just another illusion, not some clever prop that had been built by Henry Galing and his gang. But if it were real . . . Hell, in that case he was not in any reality that he had ever known before. The earth he'd come from harbored no creature that was half plant and half animal.

The Twenty-third Century?

Impossible.

To think as much was to entertain insanity.

He got up and continued his journey, although the storm drains no longer seemed a safe and reasonable alternative to the escape that Galing had offered him. When the moss dangled from the ceiling, he felt as if long tentacles were reaching for him. When it swelled up from all sides and narrowed the passageway, he saw it as a stomach that was closing around him, digesting him.

Eventually, he came to five human skeletons that dangled from the wall. The bones were start-lingly white against the blue-green vegetation. The moss had grown through the rib cages, into the bony mouths and out of the empty eye sockets; it held them in suspension, as if it were displaying them. Side by side, the five macabre figures looked like the victims of an unearthly crucifixion.

Without proof, without needing proof, he knew that the damned moss had somehow murdered them

. . .

XII

He began to look for a way out of the tunnels.

Although he supposed it could have been his imagination, as overwrought as he was, Joel swore that the damned moss sensed his fear. It knew. It also knew that he wanted out—and
it
wanted
him.

The spongy tendrils, as thick as spaghetti now, writhed much faster and more violently than they had done before. And when he squeezed through a tight passage, he had considerable difficulty escaping from the moist, clinging vegetation—as if it were trying to grip and hold him . . .

Ten minutes later, after he had taken several turns in the drainage network, he found an exit. The wall ladder was hidden beneath the moss, and he saw it only when the light from his dying candle was reflected by a pitted metal rung, the only bit of the ladder that the moss had not claimed. A glint of orange caught his eye, then the sheen of machined steel, and there it was.

The moss writhed so fast now that it made a soft whispering noise like the hissing of a snake.

He put the candle on the floor and sought the other rungs. He ripped the moss away from them.

Thousands of icy tendrils curled and wriggled wormlike in his hands. They lashed around his fingers and encircled his wrists, struggling to save themselves. But he was stronger. He tore the moss away in huge handfuls, tossed it to the floor behind him. In five minutes he had cleared the lower, half of the ladder.